Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed.

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Well well, three Wordies already listing this as a specifically Joycean word. I just noticed it in Portrait. A stick made of ash, used as either a walking-stick or a cudgel. The oddity is of course 'plant' in this sense.

It turns out however that this is close to the etymological sense of 'plant', which was a sapling, seedling, shoot etc., before being generalized to vegetation of any size or age. The OED says this is now specifically Irish and largely confined to 'ash-plant'.